Our first job today is scrub-bashing and a bonfire to get rid of the associated debris.
Malcy sets to work immediately, as you can see, fired up with enthusiam.
We are working at Childrey New Road again: it's become like a second home to us! The landowners are very enthusiastic, and are kindly allowing us to store some of our equipment on the their land. They are the ones to the south of the cut.
We are equally lucky with the landowner of the field to the north, he is very kindly allowing us to store yet more equipment and "stuff" at the edge of his field which is immediately opposite where we are working today.
This will be the location of the spillweir, which may yet be installed this year, as we are cracking ahead with the work.
I'm not entirely clear about what's happening here: Jim appears to be poking a large section of willow tree stump with a pitchfork, while Doug looks on in front, and Stefan looks on from the rear.
I have a feeling that they were trying to establish if the stump was loose enough to roll onto the bonfire, which would be a great deal less effort than having to chop it up.
Jim, he say "yes!".
Doug, Stefan, Malcy and Mike line up behind the stump and start pushing
And, yes! Over it goes, with great cheers and applause, and rolls on top of the heap of dry wood that Phil had put ready for starting the bonfire.
Oops.
We hastily assemble another pile of branches and small brushwood, and hope that Phil won't notice the difference...
Meanwhile, work has started on the ditch at the edge of the corner field, which is so choked with scrub that we can't even see it clearly.
Here's Stefan, nobly making a start at finding how far back the ditch is.You can just about see the line of the original fence, now in a very sad state, but unfortunately still strong enough to be a nuisance when scrub-bashing!
Aha, what sort of beastie is this?
Answer, it's a Silt Trap, a simple non-mechanical device for collecting run-off water, and allowing time for any silt to settle out before the water is moved away from the collection point.
This is without any doubt the biggest one I have ever seen.... I have no idea where it came from, but apparently it's going to be installed in this ditch, if we ever get it clear.
While we're making slow progress with the scrub bashing, Bob goes up to the farm, fires up Beryl, the yellow peril, and brings her down to where we are working.
Meanwhile Malcy is heroically trying to keep up with Vic, who is chopping down overhanging branches as though there were no tomorrow.
Phil, in the meantime, has started the bonfire, having not noticed that we squashed his original pile of dry wood.
Here he is muttering about how the dry wood is not as dry as he'd thought it was - oops!
But clouds of smoke are soon rising, and Vic is still chopping manfully away at the hedge, so there is plenty of fuel for it. Not to mention the huge piles of wild thorny brambles that we are clearing from the hedgeline.
Here we go, this is where we really start to make progress.
Bob runs Beryl along from left to right, scraping out the ditch and depositing the spoil neatly on the bank.
This has the effect of making us scrub-bashers work even faster!
That plume of smoke, by the way, is from Phil's bonfire, not from Beryl...
Well, they say you can't have smoke without fire (although Jim, our resident former physics teacher, would no doubt have something to say about that) so there must be a bonfire somewhere in amongst this heap of smoke.
Doug on the left is trying to get the brambles piled up neatly, while Mike on the far right is just choking gently.
When you've spent an hour laboriously hacking brambles clear of ancient barbed-wire, there's something very satisfying about watching a machine zoom along and clear the whole length to a depth of three feet, in about twenty minutes flat.
John Minns, newly appointed Events Co-ordinator for the Trust, caught having a character moment and leaning on his pitchfork.
What exactly does that expression say?
Answers on a postcard!!
Next we have a contrast in sizes: Doug (the big one) and Dmitri (the little one) climb to the top of the spoil heap to see if they can get better photos from up there.
I don't remember the spoil heap being made, so it must have been formed from the leftovers of the field drainage insertion, as I missed all that work.
And here's Malcy being a happy bunny again.
He says that there are two types of people in the world: those who shy away when a camera is produced (that'll be me, then) and those who grin like lunatics.
No prizes for guessing which category he's in!
Apparently he's growing the beard in order to win the "Biggest Beard" competition at his workplace this Christmas, and has promised us that he'll shave most of it off again afterwards.
Probably a good thing, otherwise come spring, he might find birds nesting in it!
This will be a tree on fire, then!
Don't worry, it's deliberate: it's the standing stump of an old Crack Willow that has split, fallen down over the cut, and now rotted away inside. We disposed of the top section earlier, that was the bit we rolled onto Phil's bonfire preparations, and now we're trying to weaken the bottom section.
Vic finally appears out of the hedgerow, having chopped down every overhanging branch that he and his saw-on-a-pole can reach.
He's now checking out the hollow burning willow stump to see if there is anything edible in it.
Right, the bonfire is done, the ditch is done, the Silt Trap is in position, lunch is well and truly over, and we are moving onto the final job of the day - preparing for the installation of the Causeway.
This means dropping a large pipe into the cut at this point, and banking up soil over it so that the machinery (and the operatives) can get across to the other side in order to do all the digging out of ditches etc that will needed.
Mike supervises from one side, and Phil from the other, as Bob carefully clears the gap and evens out the bottom of the cut.
Once he's cleared out all the weed, silt etc to make a nice level bottom, he tells half a dozen of us to go across and move the pipe into place.
At this point we spot a slight problem - the cut is now four feet across, four feet deep, and has a foot of water at the bottom of it! Thinks: some of us should have hopped across before the dredging started....
But we manage it, luckily we're all wearing wellies anyway.
The pipe that was brought along last time is now positioned ready to go into the cut.
Bob (who has also taken the Giant Step across the newly dredged section) lines it up, and gets Phil and Malcy ready to push.
A tense and nervous moment for all of us... hmm, building up the tension just doesn't really work in this context, does it?
It's just a length of plastic pipe being shoved into a hole, so they shove it, and in it goes.
And there it is - job done!
The pipe is now bobbing gently on top of the water - ah, minor problem, it's supposed to be at the bottom of the water, not floating on top of it.
No problem, says Bob, we'll get a couple of tons of soil on top of it, that will take care of it.
As my time is up for today, I leave them plotting how to sink the pipe, and toddle off home.